In which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy educations.

It turns out that in most cultures throughout most of history, parents haven't played with their kids. Kids played, of course, but parents didn't get involved. "American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries -- a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy," writes Christopher Shea.

A funny passage from Shea's good piece:

One inspiration for the article, Lancey [the study's article] says, was that he kept coming across accounts of parents who felt guilty that they did not enjoy playing with their children. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, both at Princeton, have found that parents routinely claim that playing with their kids is among their favorite activities, but when you ask them to record their state of mind, hour by hour, they rate time spent with their children as being about as much fun as housework.

And here's an arresting article from the Telegraph about how the French raise their kids. (Sorry, I forget who alerted me to this piece. Was it Dave Lull? Thanks Dave!) While Americans fuss anxiously about their kids' feelings and always put the kids' needs and desires at the center of family decision-making, French parents treat the kids as little animals in bad need of civilizing, and make them conform to an adult-centric life.

Janine di Giovanni writes:

One of the toughest things I have had to get used to in an otherwise idyllic Paris is the huge gap between Anglo-Saxon (or Italian American in my case) parenting and parenting French style. The French are certainly stricter. They shout more. They slap more. And they enforce manners.

But as a result, you find beautifully brought up children, and many of my French friends who are parents will argue endlessly that instilling discipline and setting boundaries is the way of showing the utmost love.

Dr Caroline Thompson, a French child psychologist and family therapist, ... points out that in Anglo-Saxon cultures, certainly in American culture, children are generally thought of as being the centre of the world, whereas in France, they are most certainly not.

My point in this posting isn't to endorse the French way. While I love a lot of French cultural creations, I'm not crazy about France or the French generally. But the fact that the French get under the skin of Americans is fascinating, non? As well as worth poking-around in.

What I want to do here is to play anthropologist -- to highlight the fact that the usual cluster of American assumptions about how to raise and interact with kids is specific to America. For example: Many Americans assume that it's imperative to vacation someplace where the kids will be happy or "enriched." Traveling someplace the parents want to see while letting the kids contend ... Why, that would be selfish and unloving, and even worthy of condemnation.

But such an approach to vacationing is anything but a species-wide universal. In fact, many of the gestures and habits by which we Americans demonstrate love for kids -- and by which we judge whether or not someone else qualifies as a loving parent -- are distinct to America. Having kids seems to be everywhere and always a Big Thing, of course. That fact seems to be a genuine human universal. But what constitutes a "loving upbringing" for children? That's far more up for grabs than we tend to think.

Before anyone condemns the French for their callousness towards their enfants, take a moment to consider the fact that the French are convinced that their way of childraising is the best in the world -- and they think this even having endured such upbringings themselves. The French also, as adults, spend far less time complaining about their parents and their rotten childhoods than Americans do.

I wrote about how kid-centric the U.S. is here, here, and here. I wrote here about America's bizarre embrace of adolescent values, and here about some of the ways in which Americans don't get the French.

American childrearing styles show a mixture of influences derived from the various different ethnic groups that have entered the US in numbers at different periods of history. Up until WWII, the primary influence was that of the Anglo-German inheritance: children were more strictly raised, affection was not so openly displayed, and complaining about one's parents was not in style. This was the traditional pattern in England and Germany too, and to some degree still is. English visitors always complained that Americans did not discipline their children enough, but that may have had something to do with the US's more flexible class structure and the different code of manners that came with it, rather than any greater degree of indulgence shown to American children in the pre-war era.

Anyway, other influences emerged after the war as immigrant groups began to acquire a greater public voice. I suspect, for example, that the habit of examining childhoods carefully to determine the cause of one's adult problems is acquired from the huge postwar popularity of psychoanalysis, which of course was a German-Jewish import. I hope that won't be construed as an anti-semitic remark! No other culture, aside from Jewish culture itself, has been so permeated by Freudian notions of childhood and its impact on adult development.

American ways of childrearing aren't specific only to America, either, if by that you mean an indulgent style of childrearing. Italians are much the same, although they do enforce discipline; and it may be the Italian influence in postwar US culture that has led people to think that adults must spend time playing with children, and that they must be openly affectionate to them.

One final point: most Americans today may be very indulgent to their children, but obsessive attention and concern with their well-being is a different matter, and seems to be very much class-related. Along with that obsession comes the furious push to achieve, which I think is more intense than anywhere else in the world (though the Dutch and Germans aren't too far behind, I hear from friends), and which may be responsible for making young Americans today so neurotic. To be driven to succeed even in kindergarten while simultaneously showered with I-love-yous is probably rather confusing.

My own contribution here is to wonder if our devotion to commercial values hasn't played a big role in the development of our attitudes. My thinking goes along these lines: What suits the market is a flexible, malleable population -- workers who will go anywhere and do anything, and consumers who can be manipulated and massaged. Adulthood? It's too settled. You want the system to serve you, not vice-versa. Therefore the system promotes adolescent and kid values as superior.

America seems to have started with an aversion to a Euro-style respect for limits. (Accepting limits seems to be a function of adulthood.) We left Europe to get away from limits, which means that we started out with a seed of the eternal-adolescent in us. But the endless push for commercial success seems to have meant that we've nourished that seed, to the point where child-and-adolescent values have taken center stage, and adulthood has turned into a phase of life with no appeal of its own other than serving children (and nostalgically recalling the fun days of adolescence). It's as though everything the world will be solved by a kid having a happy childhood. What a dopey dream.

Needless to say, the Boomers played a big role in these developments ...

I'd love to see more Americans fret a wee bit less about kidhood, laugh a bit more about adolescence as an awful time of life that passes quickly, and see a bit more of value in adult values and pleasures. I think our vulnerability to anxieties about childhood and adolescence makes us prone to getting bossed around by the pashas of our culture ... We lose our dignity so we get taken advantage-of -- and all because someone somewhere is always repeating, "But is it good for the kids?"

I've only spent a few short vacation weeks in France, so I can't speak with any authority.

However, I wonder if the American view of childrearing doesn't reflect the class mobility of our society. European society does not offer, I think, the incredible class mobility that American society offers. Therefore, for American parents, the payoff for successfully nuturing a child can be much bigger.

And, now I'll go way out there and state that the past 60 years of white American culture have been a reaction to the criminal atrocities of Nazi Germany. There have been a number of psychological tracts that theorize that Nazi-ism arose out of the cold, harsh German family structure. Since I'm half German, I can certainly see that. So, particularly among German and Nordic Americans, families have struggled to overcome this emotional coldness. My father was incredibly determined that his children would be spared the horrors he witnessed in the Depression and in the European theater of WWII.

My family, only two generations ago, lived in such incredible emotional darkness, drunkenness, poverty and fear of sexuality. My father was precisely that American type of Dad who came home from the factory to play baseball with the kids in the back yard. He clearly foresaw the possibility that the opportunities of post-WWII America might bring his children into a world of light, sobriety, material plenty and love.

God bless him, he did sacrifice himself for this future that he wanted for his children. And, for the most part, it worked. I often wish that there had been more in this life for him. But that was not what he chose.

Oddly, this brings me to note that this summer is the 40th anniversity of the Summer of Love in San Francisco.

I've been told that St. John Crevecoeur wrote about American childraising before the American Revolution (not adults playing with kids, but indulgence of mouthy kids), so it's pretty deep rooted.

Posted by: John Emerson on July 23, 2007 11:53 AM

The utter childishness of our culture bugs me to no end. And I think Michael is right that it's primarily driven by commerce. Kids are fast and loose with the cash after all.

What style of music, to take one example, is developing today that serves adults? There isn't one. Adults almost all listen to what was on when they were in college, no matter what age they are. Other wise they listen to some form that matured before the onslaught of the boomers, like jazz, blues or classical. It's such a bore. We have a culture that is at the same time opulent and impoverished.

Posted by: Todd Fletcher on July 23, 2007 12:02 PM

I'm a father of 3 boys, ages 14, 6 and 4. I have never enjoyed "playing" with my kids; that is, sitting down and playing one of their games with them, be it Legos, action figures, etc. It's a chore, quite frankly, and it's something my own father never did and I have never once felt that he should have.

I don't know why I do it, actually. My kids enjoy it and ask for it, I guess is the reason. With our oldest, I felt a bit guilty for him being an only child (until he was 8).

I think I've mentioned it here before, but the thing that most struck me about Europe was the children. We spent a few weeks in Spain and never once saw a Spanish child misbehave. The parents there take their kids everywhere, at all hours of the day and night, which I suppose gets them used to behaving in an adult world.

One thing about many parents my age (38) and younger that I can't understand is their seeming enjoyment of things meant for kids. Movies, toys, music. We're all supposed to enjoy these things as a family, but I couldn't give a rat's ass about the movie Ratatouille. And yet so many of my generation love it and media like it with the fervor of a child. I don't get it.

Posted by: the patriarch on July 23, 2007 12:03 PM

Michael - You could also have some fun looking at Scandanavian child rearing practices, alongside French and US styles.

It's all so complicated, but I think that a big problem I see with some US parents is not that they play with their kids, but that they seek to organize, regulate and fill with learning-related stuff. But to paraphrase The Who, "Parent, leave those kids alone." There is much to be said, I think, for letting kids create their own worlds of play.

On the other hand, I think that there is great wisdom in letting kids have some say in where to go for vacations, and having some input, some sense of participation in the family. What would be the point in taking kids to a vacation spot which they have absolutely no interest in and which bores them silly? I hate to see when parents do this, and then pile on insults by yelling at, disciplining kids or -- worse spanking them -- when they squirm or act bored or otherwise react with common sense when taken to a place that adults like but the kids hate. I wonder how long a marriage would last if one spouse always chose a place to visit which bored the living daylights out of the other spouse, and pointedly refused to consider the other partner?

Of course, parents like to pretend that their own acts of stupdidity, callousness and selfishness are neccesary to raise kids or to instill discipline, but sometimes it is little more than an opportunity to be a petty tyrant.

Posted by: Alec on July 23, 2007 12:25 PM

A quote from an American woman in Paris:"What has always puzzled me is why generation after generation of French women raise French girls to become French women - bitchy, competitive, anti-fraternal, unsmiling, the preternatural Froide-ness."

C'mon Michael, you're not going to just sit there and let someone slander The Frenchwoman like that, are you? It's amazing how clueless people can be: how could she think that some of the most charming and nonchalant women on Earth are "bitchy, competitive, and unsmiling?" That sounds more like Manhattan or L.A. -- although there you do see plenty of fake smiles.

Whit Stillman, who's been living in Paris for several years, said he thought that a lot of the American perception of the French as rude or aloof likely stems from the American having crossed some "bright line" of French manners and customs, maybe without realizing it, and being socially shunned to bring him back in line.

I'll bet that's what the woman quoted has been doing the entire time she's been in Paris, obviously failing to consider that maybe there's something outta-whack about *her* conduct rather than the conduct of every single Frenchwomen she's ever seen.

About the childrearing, though, we know from Behavior Genetics research that parenting doesn't affect adult personality, and most things like language, style of dress, etc. are picked up more from peers and the larger culture than from one's parents. So the article misses that -- it's the inescapable totality of the French system of manners that keeps kids from staying mired in adolescence and boorishness.

Here, you find plenty of individual, isolated parents who would love to civilize their kid, but it's just too difficult, given what the parent is fighting against: the kid's likely group of peers, plus the larger culture of adolescence.

And it's just like a hippy-dippy Boomer mother to wonder whether the strict French etiquette will stifle creativity -- y'know, because France has been a lightweight in cultural production over the past several hundred years. This is coming from someone who's living in Paris, surrounded by evidence to the contrary... for god's sake, will *anything* snap hippies out of their delusion?

I don't think manners affects cultural production either way, though -- we're pretty brutish but still manage to dominate lots of the sciences, and somewhat less so in the arts. Ha, that'd be rich if it turned out to be true: if strict manners fostered better art, while laxer standards fostered better science. Take that, hippies! It doesn't seem unbelievable, though, if you look at which academics come off as more polished and civilized -- a prof of engineering or physics vs. history or drama.

My girlfriend's ten-year-old brother virtually sets the terms for their entire family. For his birthday, they let him choose where the family will go for their summer vacation. The rest of the time they're maintaing his jammed-packed schedule. Schooling, music lessons, multiple sports practices, martial arts--the kid has no free time, and the entire family shuttles him around and watches him as though he were the president and they his Secret Service agents.

The GF once told me that her little brother was really all her parents did or cared about. She said this with distinct pride, as though it would be a terrible thing if her parents did something for themselves once in a while.

Her parents are terrific people, but as far as I can tell, they don't have many adult friends and they don't engage in many adult activities. It's just the kid, the kid, the kid. They're like his personal assistants.

And the kid doesn't do what I would consider normal kid stuff either. I once asked the GF if he ever just played around the neighborhood with his friends. She said he didn't have enough free time and wasn't friends with many children, but that occasionally his parents would squeeze "play dates" into the schedule. I pictured something akin to a junior board room meeting, the kids arriving with tiny briefcases.

I'm sure he'll get into a great school and be successful, and my GF's parents are surely doing a terrific job in that and other respects. But I wonder about what happens if he's *not* a success. What pressure!

Posted by: Ron on July 23, 2007 12:47 PM

Postpone playing with your children until they're old enough to play cricket. By that time they may be the only people left that you can bowl out.

Posted by: dearieme on July 23, 2007 1:03 PM

Clio, if you don't want your remarks to be construed as Anti-Semitic, don't make Anti-Semitic remarks.
You contradict yourself immediately, when you first say up until WWII the German attitude towards childraising was strict, respect to adults was enforced, talking back discouraged - and then blame "German-Jewish import" for relaxed/indulgent attitude towards children. German Jewish immigrants were, for the most part, secular, and in their customs and habits resembled that of general German population. So -what are you saying, Clio - either Germans were not strict, or the rot comes from Jews within German culture?

I don't know how many Jews you personally know, but let me assure you: what you say about Italians is doubly true for Jews, and had been true for 5000 years. What's more, I think this particular combination, traditional for Jewish families everywhere: warmth, love, continuous support of one's children and at the same time - encouragement of higher achievement and disapproval of negative traits - that's what made my people the way we are - successive in any endeavor we undertake.

Understanding of the connections between one's childhood and adult life is not a matter of Jewish pecuiliarity - ask any child psychologist, Jewish or otherwise. It's scientific fact.

MB, I can understand why you, never having experience of child rearing, would be puzzled by what you call "combo of anxiety, indulgence, and pushiness", but there is nothing strange in it for any parent - or, in fact, for any person in managerial position, from time immemorial: you have to have carrots and sticks applied appropriately, according to how you want your charge to develop. And in case of parenting, your task of rasing a decent and successful human being is helped tremendously if the child feel unrelenting love behind all your requirements ; that not only "mommy knows best", but "mommy loves you and has your best interests in heart".

Clio, if you don't want your remarks to be construed as Anti-Semitic, don't make Anti-Semitic remarks.
You contradict yourself immediately, when you first say up until WWII the German attitude towards childraising was strict, respect to adults was enforced, talking back discouraged - and then blame "German-Jewish import" for relaxed/indulgent attitude towards children. German Jewish immigrants were, for the most part, secular, and in their customs and habits resembled that of general German population. So -what are you saying, Clio - either Germans were not strict, or the rot comes from Jews within German culture?

I don't know how many Jews you personally know, but let me assure you: what you say about Italians is doubly true for Jews, and had been true for 5000 years. What's more, I think this particular combination, traditional for Jewish families everywhere: warmth, love, continuous support of one's children and at the same time - encouragement of higher achievement and disapproval of negative traits - that's what made my people the way we are - way above average in any endeavor we undertake.

Understanding of the connections between one's childhood and adult life is not a matter of Jewish peculiarity - ask any child psychologist, Jewish or otherwise. It's a scientific fact.

MB, I can understand why you, never having experience of child rearing, would be puzzled by what you call "combo of anxiety, indulgence, and pushiness", but there is nothing strange in it for any parent - or, in fact, for any person in managerial position, from time immemorial: you have to have carrots and sticks applied appropriately, if you want your charge to develop. And in case of parenting, your task of rasing a decent and successful human being is helped tremendously if the child feel unrelenting love behind all your requirements ; that not only "mommy knows best", but "mommy loves you and has your best interests in heart".

Michael: "I'd love to see more Americans... see a bit more of value in adult values and pleasures."

What might these be? Most of the adults I know have no values, and nothing seems to give them pleasure. The only thing I see that might pass as a distinctly adult value is the rhetoric of "responsibility", which seems to be a state most readily identified by its pleasurelessness.

Posted by: Brian on July 23, 2007 2:09 PM

God, how I wish I could read a memoir that begins, "I was a rotten kid and an awful burden on my parents all the time I was with them."

Posted by: Richard S. Wheeler on July 23, 2007 2:29 PM

Tatyana, that wasn't an anti-semitic remark. I didn't say that the German-Jewish style of child-rearing was strict, at all at all. As it happens, I do know many Jews, and I do know that their style of child-rearing is much more Italian than Germanic, with a greater emphasis on achievement than Italian culture generally makes.

I said that the American pre-occupation with childhood as the source of adult troubles (or success) had been much affected by German-Jewish psychoanalysis, which, I suggested, has had an equally great impact upon Jewish culture.

Much of modern psychology would scarcely exist if not for the influence of some of the great Jewish pioneers (Freud and Klein), so it's not adding much to say that psychology in general is concerned with the impact of childhood on adult life. In any case, Jewish culture has a more profound understanding of both the importance of self-knowledge, and its difficulty, than any other.

Nor - and this is especially important - did I describe this tendency as rot of any kind. I happen to share the belief that childhood is extremely important to adult life - and I think that this realisation was, in general, a positive contribution to human knowledge. That it has in recent years been carried a bit too far says nothing about the validity of the original analysis, the rottenness of Jewish culture, or anything else you ascribe to me.

Tatyana, I just thought I'd add that I think your suggestion that secular Jews, German or otherwise, have no distinct culture apart from their religious identity, is very odd and counter to anything that almost any secular Jewish person I know would say.

"I hope that won't be construed as an anti-semitic remark! " See what happens when you try to be nice, Clio? Only Jews are allowed to analyze the rest of us. Try it in reverse and you get attacked.

Posted by: Bob Grier on July 23, 2007 3:38 PM

God, how I wish I could read a memoir that begins, "I was a rotten kid and an awful burden on my parents all the time I was with them."

Posted by Richard S. Wheeler at July 23, 2007
***********************************************

Amen!!! Thank you Mr Wheeler

Posted by: Reid Farmer on July 23, 2007 3:59 PM

A couple of thoughts...

One of the reasons for kid-centrism today is that people are highly mobile, not necessarily upwardly mobile. People don't know their neighbors that well, and kids aren't neighborhood kids--their friends are at school, and they need to be driven around to see them. This is true even for the middle class that isn't trying to get into an Ivy League. Think decline of the old, traditional neighborhood and suburbanization.

Second, maybe parents LIKE to play with their kids on occasion--throw a baseball, shoot a basket, play a game with them from time to time just because they enjoy it and their kids. Pretty nutty huh? No ulterior motives?

Posted by: BIOH on July 23, 2007 4:11 PM

Clio, don't distort my words, please.

I didn't say that the German-Jewish style of child-rearing was strict, at all at all. - I didn't say you did.

your suggestion that secular Jews, German or otherwise, have no distinct culture apart from their religious identity - was never my suggestion.

I'm not going to argue to various straw men.

I said that the American pre-occupation with childhood as the source of adult troubles (or success) had been much affected by German-Jewis(TE) psychoanalysis, which, I suggested, has had an equally great impact upon Jewish culture

Why do you accent "German-Jewish" when talking about psychoanalisis, why not simply German? How does ethnicity of those scientists affects what they did for their field? Does Jewishness of Einstein makes any difference in regards to his theories? Or, say, Pavlov being ethnic Russian adds something significant to discovery of reflexes? Freid and Klein were not "Jewish pioneers", they were Pioneers, period.

No other culture, aside from Jewish culture itself, has been so permeated by Freudian notions of childhood and its impact on adult development."
False.
Not one, really? On the contrary, I think every culture - as soon as this singular culture got hold on notions of psychoanalysis. It was an universal vogue, a fashion of the decade (much too exaggerated in importance, in my opinion) - but to ascribe it specifically to Jews?

Posted by: Tatyana on July 23, 2007 4:35 PM

Michael - I believe I left the link to that piece. At least, I remember reading it and thinking, "This would interest Mr. Blowhard". I identified with the Cruel French Mothers, tend to think other people's children are savages, and never made any bones about the fact that I find playing with children boring. Why shouldn't I? I'm an adult. When I was a child I had not the slightest interest in the active company of adults, either. I was as bored by adults then as I am by children now. Children should be playing with other children.

Concur with all above comments regarding the infantilization of modern adults. In particular, I have an intense hostility toward the "mommy"-fication of motherhood. Why a grown woman with even the most tenuous hold on a sense of her own dignity would self-refer, or allow herself to be referrred to, in any context but that of her own toddler's speech, as "mommy", I cannot fathom. But here we are. Would that my late mother should be living at this hour, just to delight in the blood-freezing basilisk glare she would bestow upon any "mommy"-ing marketer. (The ability to give good glare is one of the most important maternal skills.)

Agnostic - men and women may have very different perceptions of people's behavior, and both be entirely accurate in their assessments. I don't know France, so I can't judge if the author is being unjust, but she is far from the first female foreigner (not just American or "hippy dippy Boomer mother") to remark the difficulty of forming female friendships with Frenchwomen, or to observe that Frenchwomen tend to be more jealous and hyper-competitive sexually than women of other cultures. That men universally find them alluring and charming is neither here nor there in evaluating diGiovanni's claims. (I do admire and cultivate preternatural Froide-ness myself, though of course in the more personally appropriate Northern, rather than Gallic, style.)

C'mon Michael, you're not going to just sit there and let someone slander The Frenchwoman like that, are you? It's amazing how clueless people can be: how could she think that some of the most charming and nonchalant women on Earth are "bitchy, competitive, and unsmiling?"

As a Frenchman, I can tell you that The Frenchwoman is indeed somewhat bitchy & competitive. Along with many other fine things of course, but that woman's assessment is hardly slander. I think this is a case of the grass always being greener...

Posted by: M on July 23, 2007 6:56 PM

Richard, that was a priceless post! I couldn't agree more. Perhaps one reason Americans are so obsessed with 'giving their children a happy childhood' is that they figure they'll be hauled over the coals in yet another whiny, self-indulgent, woe-is-me memoir by Junior twenty years down the road -- and it will sell, sell, sell!

Here in Hong Kong we see a potent mix of indulgence (with very young children, at least; older kids are disciplined more strictly and are expected to work very hard in school) and overweening achievement orientation, exacerbated by the fact that the birth rate here is one of the world's lowest, meaning there are lots of only children.

Point 1: Here you talk about Italians and say that their child-rearing methods are similar to those of Jewish people, as if defending yourself from a charge that I made.

"I don't know how many Jews you personally know, but let me assure you: what you say about Italians is doubly true for Jews, and had been true for 5000 years. What's more, I think this particular combination, traditional for Jewish families everywhere: warmth, love, continuous support of one's children and at the same time - encouragement of higher achievement and disapproval of negative traits - that's what made my people the way we are - way above average in any endeavor we undertake."

Your response to my explanation:"'I didn't say that the German-Jewish style of child-rearing was strict, at all at all.' - I didn't say you did."

It was not unnatural for me to assume that this was what you were getting at, in raising that point about Italian child-rearing methods.

Point 2:"Why do you accent "German-Jewish" when talking about psychoanalisis, why not simply German? How does ethnicity of those scientists affects what they did for their field? Does Jewishness of Einstein makes any difference in regards to his theories? Or, say, Pavlov being ethnic Russian adds something significant to discovery of reflexes? Freid and Klein were not "Jewish pioneers", they were Pioneers, period"

I said they were German-Jewish pioneers because I believe that self-analysis of the kind that looks deep into the heart, in the traditional meaning of the word (the seat of emotions, the place of the passions, the place of the will) is a profoundly Jewish cultural tendency, related to that depth of culture and understanding you speak of in your last comment. Here is a comment from Peter Brown's The Body and Society that addresses this aspect of Jewish culture in late antiquity:

"Yet, for Jews, the daily conflict of body and mind was overshadowed by a mightier and more significant dualism [than that of mind vs body]...Every believer confronted God not as a soul committed, for a time, to the necessary of thankless task of bringing order to an alien body, but rather as the possessor of a 'heart', that is, of a hidden core of the self that could respond to or reject the will of its Creator." - p. 35

This understanding of the human personality as the self at war with itself, to its own injury, differs from the Greco-Roman understanding of the human self as a mind at war with that recalcitrant animal, the body. It is one of the central insights of psychoanalysis. I do not think psychoanalysis would exist in Western culture, in its present form at any rate, were it not for that culture's inheritance from the Jews.

Point 3: One of your other issues: your suggestion that secular Jews, German or otherwise, have no distinct culture apart from their religious identity - was never my suggestion

The reason I said this, above, was that you had told me this, below:German Jewish immigrants were, for the most part, secular, and in their customs and habits resembled that of general German population.

I would hope that I could speak of psychoanalysis as showing a Jewish inheritance in the same way that I might speak of sociology as showing a German one. I do not think the charge of anti-semitism is fair here. All the same, will you allow me to say that I meant no offence?

You're wasting your time, Clio. The entire exercise is to place the suspicion of "racism" on you. They more you squirm, the worse it gets This is an old Marxist tactic from the 1930s that was used to smear their opponents and make ALL their opposition out to be Nazis. Many Jewish people are still using this device today, even if they aren't Marxists. Don't bite. On this website, people are way too knowledgeable for this nonsense. We know precisely what you meant originally and it's just fine. Don't argue with crazy people.

Posted by: Bob Grier on July 24, 2007 8:08 AM

Bob G: one of the core values celebrated in America (and I love it) is "don't thread on me". Another one, "mind your own business". Which I always do - the only time I analysed anything Grier is when it sounded like this.

It's funny, Moira Breen, to see you assuming things that are very far from reality and then making doubly false conclusions. A hint: my "mommy knows best", etc, was mocking other people's parenting style. Not only I had never in my life talked about myself in the 3rd person, I was (in my earlier parenting days) falling into another extreme. We never called our son "son", or "boy" and never refer to each outher in his presence as Mother, Father - only by name, so there was never any confusion as to whom we meant. So he had taken after us, and in return adderssed us by names and refered to himself as "I" - but called us mom and dad when talked about us to other children. Which didn't affect his understanding of authority within the family and never bothered anybody - until we arrived in US and pedagogical nincompoops in public school' kindergarten expressed their shock und horror at my withholding vital information from my child: "Does he know you're his Mother? Are you trying to make him believe he's adopted? Do you run from responsibility? When are you going to break the news to him?"

Oh, NY public school is one anti-parental institution, let me tell you. Some half-witted 2-years-of-community-college graduate has a nerve to advise me, somebody 10 yrs her senior and triple life and education experience, "to create quality time for communication". First thing the school did was to explain to my son that raising one's voice to a child is grounds for claims of "parental abuse". They wanted him to spy on his family - to them. We had to spend so much precious time and efforts to negate all those senseless intrusions...all this lost time that we might use in productive ways!

I'm Jewish and think everybody should just cool it. The anti-semitism stuff is off, Clio was just generalizing about another culture in the way people often do around here (including Tatyana at times). Such generalizations are usually simplifications, but don't have malicious intent. I mean, if Freud doesn't show some secularized Jewish influence than nobody does.

Although I would add that Freud (and Marx) are very particularly secular German Jewish, in a way that is quite different from other Jewish cultures (like Eastern European or North African). I would ascribe a lot of tendencies of that culture to the particular history of Jews in Germany, as opposed to Judaism in general. Frankly a lot of the religious elements of Judaism qua Judaism (like distinction with Greco-Roman thought that Clio draws in her last post) were incorporated into Christianity and thus European culture generally. That quintessentially Jewish guy, Jesus, transplanted many Jewish religious values into the heart of the culture. The ones that remained uniquely Jewish have mostly to do with the legalistic and scholarly emphasis of Rabbinical Judaism (people of the Book, etc.) and also the isolation and oppression suffered by the Jews.

Posted by: mq on July 24, 2007 10:37 AM

On the main topic of the post: I do think there is something off with childrearing here. But it is hard to blaze a new path on your own, as one family. There are big problems with child-rearing in the U.S. due to our brutal system of comprehensive (as opposed to tracked or private) neighborhood schools, which plunge kids into a Lord of the Flies type peer-dominated world very early on. Over socialization to adult values might not teach you the survival skills for that world.

One can add to all of this the overcommittment of American parents in the workplace, with few external supports for childraising (from government assistance to maternity/paternity leave to presence of grandparents nearby). In Europe, mothers are more likely to stay at home and there is much more government and community support.

Posted by: mq on July 24, 2007 10:42 AM

mq, a man of good sense. The next beer is on me.

Posted by: Bob Grier on July 24, 2007 10:46 AM

Based on my experience raising two children (daughter 25 and son 21) in an American upper middle/middle class milieu, I agree that most parents here do focus on their children's lives and activities. We certainly did.

Where I see a great dividing line, however, is in what the parents see as their parenting role. We took a somewhat traditional approach where the parent is an authority figure who is responsible for making decisions about the child's life. As the child gets older and matures, she takes on more of the decision-making as she is capable.

I see a terrifying number of American parents who seem to treat their children as equals and shy away from exerting any authority over them. They seem to think that their parental duty is to keep their children from ever being unhappy or disappointed. I remember going to a party last year where a mother spent 20 minutes trying to convince her 5 year old son that it was time to leave. It was horrifying. This combined with overly protectiveness yields disasterous results. We have unfortunately seen this in some dear friends. They would not allow their 13 year old daughters to walk their dogs unaccompanied around the block in our "Beaver Cleaver" middle-class Santa Barbara neighborhood. Too dangerous.

I think you can involve yourself in your children's activities but not give them the impression that they are the center of the universe. We never planned a vacation around what they wanted to do. We went to see things that we thought were fun or interesting and just assumed they would find them that way too. And usually they did.

It's very gratifying these days to see how horrified our children are when they see mis-behaving children or children bossing their parents around.

Posted by: Reid Farmer on July 24, 2007 12:47 PM

Tatyana - It's funny, Moira Breen, to see you assuming things that are very far from reality and then making doubly false conclusions. A hint: my "mommy knows best", etc, was mocking other people's parenting style.[...]

Oh good grief, Tatyana. I hadn't even read your first comment so I could not possibly be assuming anything about it, falsely, truly, singly, doubly, or quadruply. If I wanted to comment on something you'd said I'd have addressed you directly and not weaseled around the point.

Reid Farmer - "I see a terrifying number of American parents who seem to treat their children as equals and shy away from exerting any authority over them.

I've seen the same - parents (especially mothers) who seem to have a real horror of the very idea of authority. As if a "learning animal" with a long period maturation doesn't by it's very nature need training and instruction, and just pops out ready to rock, no "assembly" required. I'm in the amen corner here, of course - my "parenting philosophy" seems exactly consonant with your own.

Oh, Tatyana, btw - I seem to recall that I broached the subject of my disgust with all things "mommy" some time ago, on my own or someone else's blog. If you would like to consider that a rude response to your comment here and enjoy taking retroactive offense, let me know and I'll see if I can retrieve the link.

I think Tatyana is actually a Frenchwoman, which may explain all the commotion in here today.

Posted by: Milo on July 24, 2007 7:43 PM

Moira: I take it as apology and you're forgiven. Oh, Moira: I don't read your blog; would you want me to?

Milo: I have different explanation.

So, nobody actually read what I wrote - you prefer to concentrate on a bogyman (or "Frenchwoman")?

Returning to the subject.
My observations are limited to NY, in other states the reasons might be different. Here, I think in large part the irresponsibility or the parents stems from their overall political (liberal) views. I see parallels between their constant self-flagellation where imaginary "American Guilt" is concerned, and their guilt-ridden behavior towards their children (either sincere or learned). Their cultural relativism and belief that "children have equal rights" - note, same trait with overlooking responsibilities, in both cases. Scene between a mother and her 5yo, that Reid Farmer described above, and numerous variations of it that I've seen here - and useless debates in UN. So on.

And then children who were brought up in this atmosphere grow up, and then some of them become teachers, and some of the teachers become Department of Education bureaucrats, and voilą: we have what we have.

Living in Seattle, father of a 13-year-old girl at a private school, I've been living more or less in the petri dish itself of the kind of hyper-attentive parenting the Lancy piece is so het up about. And guess what? The little hothouse flowers are, overwhelmingly, bright, interested, respectful children. And I cannot believe he would adduce some African tribe's childrearing practices as a counterexample. What's the point? Do you know anyone in the US, outside maybe of some Oregon commune, living in a tribe? I don't, and I never met anyone who was, either.

What's worse is the truly idiotic PC overreaching when he talks about the virtues conferred by lower-class "practices" such as negligence and berating. OK, so they do confer some benefits, self-reliance I guess. But patience, which he also cites, is just not part of that package. Schooling in patience would seem to me to include, at a minimum, being able not to kill somebody because their girlfriend wouldn't talk to you, or because they couldn't pay the twenty bucks they lost at craps.

I see it every day, shuttling between the private school and my immediate neighbors, mostly Section 8, whose kids are a notch above feral. It's almost like witnessing speciation in action.

I liked Jerome Singer's response:

"I'm not clear what's bothering this guy," he says, referring to Lancy. "We are not talking about the parents playing all day long with the children. We're just saying that children need to play, and particular kinds of play -- imaginative play that has a storytelling element to it -- are very useful" in our culture.

You have to take account of the actual circumstances people find themselves in, which for us do not include a tribal homeland or even a 1960's Stingray and stickball paradise.

Posted by: croydonfacelift on July 26, 2007 12:54 AM

"You have to take account of the actual circumstances people find themselves in, which for us do not include a tribal homeland or even a 1960's Stingray and stickball paradise."

This is interesting because while I agree with it, I also believe that the Stingray and stickball paradise is right in front of us, we just don't trust ourselves anymore to let it happen. The actual living conditions in the suburbs have not changed since the 60s. Crime has not gone up, income has risen comparable to inflation, the vast majority of kids in these areas still come from an intact family. The big difference is the two-income household, I suppose.

What I'm getting at is that environment in the suburbs is already there for kids to be able to roam around and play without fear. The fear comes from us, the parents, who buy into the pervasive media's characterization of our society as one under attack from...well, just about anything. Child predators (abduction rates have not risen or fallen substantially in 50 years), gun violence, drugs, etc. These things were there in the 70s when I was a kid, let loose in the morning and back home only at lunch and at dusk.

I live in a very upwardly mobile little suburb, but in the older part of town. I see the difference in the way kids are allowed to play in our neighborhood versus the newer developments. Kids are all over the place in our neighborhood, for better and worse, while you barely see kids outside in the new places. This is partly due to the income gap, where more affluent parents enroll their kids in unending programs or they are ensconced in elaborately appointed media cocoons, while the parents in our neighborhood mostly shoo their kids outside and tell them to play.

I'm not down with neglect or berating kids, of course, but I believe you have to have both the trust and the courage to let your kids figure some things out on their own. I could just be rationalizing the fact that I really don't enjoy playing children's games with my kids, but I don't think so.

Posted by: the patriarch on July 26, 2007 10:01 AM

croydon - Like patriarch said. I don't think we face an opposition between hyper-attentive parenting on the one side and tribal or Section 8 norms on the other. The French parents discussed above would hardly qualify for either of those latter categories, and I'm sure they're as least as likely to produce "bright, interested, respectful" children as hyper-involved American parents. I remember my teen-aged niece's loud laments, upon her family's returning to the U.S. after several years living in Paris, about the vastly restricted freedom to enjoy plain old, jes' hangin' out, peer-to-peer leisure. (And French middle-class kids don't get to hang out more because their parents are less academically ambitious for them.) Now my own daughter is voicing the same complaints, even without benefit of the international comparison. When did middling-middle class kids start having to make appointments two weeks in advance to hang with their friends on a Saturday afternoon?

I'm wholly unconvinced that the hyper-attentive approach is the correct adaptation to the "circumstances [we] find ourselves in". At any rate, that "1960s stickball paradise" equivalent I grew up in seemed to do a damned good job of producing successful, disciplined, goal-driven, civilized adults. Slacking off on the Mozart-for-baby and and allowing time to let 'em hang out "free form" with their peers isn't going to render them unfit for the rigors of modern existence or doom them to a future in the projects. I think we had a freedom, and, when small, a freedom for unhindered imaginative play, that kids today don't get to enjoy. And I don't think that's going to make them better-functioning adults. And at least we didn't have Fretful Mom organizing the crap out of every blessed second of our waking lives and yanking the goddamned cell-phone collar on us every goddamned hour on the hour. Geez, some of these women, I can't watch them in action without "Lizzie Borden took an axe..." running through my head.

Don't really see Singer's point, either. Nobody's arguing that children don't need to play imaginatively. I ruled a vast kingdom of imagination as a child, with and without my peers, without my parents having to get in my face all the time.

Like you, though, I do roll my eyes whenever I come across The Experts holding up some tribe or other as a superior source of child-rearing advice. Uh, dude, when their child-rearing practices produce children who can find their way out of the Stone Age, I'll consider giving a listen. Until then...

The defense of lower class parenting is also interesting, and puts them in a pickle they don't seem to notice. If they're doing fine, why are you bothering them? If you believe their socioeconomic condition should and can be improved, maybe adopting middle-class norms might help (which to be fair, some of them are advocating). Or would they ever consider that parenting norms might not really have all that much to do with relative condition?

patriarch, moira--
I think you're both correct that hothouse parenting isn't optimal, and I wasn't really asserting anything contrary. Chiefly I was disagreeing with the author of the "study" cited in the original article. It's essentially pointless to talk about tribalist parenting, and stupid to the point of wicked to praise the way the majority of poor Americans raised their kids.

I also agree that, for whatever reason, educated Americans have raised two generations of kids under conditions of modest paranoia, but I couldn't say why this transpired. Part of it, I am sure, is that there are so few stay-at-home parents, so kids aren't home much before dinner during the school year, and are shuffled around from camp to relative to camp all summer long. I believe those are the circumstances of nearly everyone but the poor and the very rich.

In any case, exploring why this has happened would be an interesting subject, in contrast to the article actually produced.

Posted by: croydonfacelift on July 27, 2007 12:19 AM

At any rate, that "1960s stickball paradise" equivalent I grew up in seemed to do a damned good job of producing successful, disciplined, goal-driven, civilized adults.

Yes, but fewer of the children survived.

Of course we're talking about dropping death (and permanent injury, etc.) rates from small to minuscule, but that doesn't mean that lives aren't being saved.

Toronto schools recently "nerfed" all its playgrounds. It gained large spread criticism, but two years later, the death rates from playground injuries has dropped hugely (again, from small to really small).

As we, as a society, become wealthier, we have gained a far greater ability to shield our children from danger. Given our biological instincts, is it any surprise that given the means, we do?

Posted by: Tom West on July 27, 2007 7:05 AM

croydon: I also agree that, for whatever reason, educated Americans have raised two generations of kids under conditions of modest paranoia, but I couldn't say why this transpired. Part of it, I am sure, is that there are so few stay-at-home parents..

Very good point, and not addressed in any of this. Our great freedom probably depended very much on an archipelago of mothers making regular unconscious security scans over the neighborhood kids.

Tom West: Yes, but fewer of the children [in the stickball paradise] survived.

Yes, but the constant presence of death on our playgrounds gave life savor and meaning! We lived large, damn it!

With The Daughter Unit (our only child) now 25 my active childrearing years are over. Being proud hippy progressive sorts my wife & I followed a handful of "rules" when the DU was young that fit our radical notions. We did not use baby-speak (Oooh, isn iddlle snookypups all muzzy wuzzy, yes!) We did not regularly keep sweets in the house and did not serve dessert. We did not use corporal punishment (except in extremely rare, generally life threatening situations like when, at 3, the Daughter Unit almost made it past the end of the driveway into the busy street and she got a quick swat to the behind.) She went to daycare from the time she was three to accommodate our busy schedules. My wife bartered her services leading a music program for the daycare center in exchange for our daughter's tuition; this allowed us to really know what was going on at the daycare center. We took her to concerts and various other "adult" events. Sometimes that meant one of us had to physically remove the Daughter to the car or other location when she became noisy or otherwise threatened to upset the enjoyment of other adults at the event.

After we moved, due to our less than high income, from the high-income suburbs where we living and headed a few states north to be closer to family she entered elementary school. A few years later we moved a few towns away. Now her school was three blocks away and she walked to school. By the time she was ten or so we taught her to use the local bus system. She would occasionally go downtown to hang out or shop. As a teen she started with the earliest curfew of her cohort with the understanding that, if she kept meeting curfew, we'd keep extending it. If there were problems (someone drinking, making sexual demands, etc.) she should call for "rescue" and we would not punish her. She did call a few times and was rescued without punishment. She always either made curfew or called with a plausible excuse and got home within half an hour of the curfew. By the end of high school she had the most liberal curfew.

Perhaps our childrearing harmed her in certain ways, she has rarely had many friends her own age, being more comfortable with people either older than she is (including the elderly and boomers) and five or ten years younger. We think that overall we did an okay job of raising up a human being capable of interacting with a wide range of people and situations.

She is currently a semi-permanent house guest with 'voluntary relatives." The adults are a friend of mine from high school she's known as an "uncle" for all her life and his wife. The Daughter Unit considers her "aunt" among her best friends. The couples' children include a son about to leave for university in Scotland and a daughter in her mid-teens who is another great friend.

In short, childrearing is a contact sport and unless you're in the game, it is all theory. When you ARE in the game all you can do is keep playing until they're old enough to vote.

Posted by: Chris White on July 29, 2007 9:59 AM

My wife is Vietnamese and I am spending a year or so with her and her family in Viet Nam while we apply for her visa to the U.S. I have never seen people so devoted to playing with their children as the Vietnamese. Since we are in the north, I doubt that this has much if anything to do with American influence.